Early one morning, a few minutes past six, I stumbled into my two-year-old son’s bedroom and as I lifted him out of his crib he announced, “I want meatballs.” This was just after I had said, “Good morning, mi amor.” Had he not heard me? “You want meatballs?” I asked, just to be sure I heard him right. He was wearing his favorite monkey pajamas. “Sí,” he said. At that moment, like any moment where he speaks Spanish, where a Spanish word instead of an English one escapes his little mouth, I instantly feel a fierce floating happiness, that all is right in the world and in my life and his life or at least in that sentence, Sí. In those moments, he could ask for anything and I would probably give it to him. Meatballs at 6 a.m. Why not?

My first language was Spanish. Or, so I’ve been told. When I was a young child, my family and I only spoke Spanish at home. It was my older sister who brought English to our two-bedroom apartment in Boston. She was the one who diligently did her worksheets and packets of homework while seated on the plastic-covered couch. Once, I asked my mother why she didn’t know the answer to one of the worksheet questions, but my sister did. You’re old, I said, as if old people knew everything there ever was to know, as if learning stopped at a certain point, like growing in height. My mother laughs when she tells this story.

After English invaded our home, displacing Spanish word after Spanish word— first through those photocopied packets and later through television and eventually my own crinkly-covered library books—Spanish became the stepchild language. I didn’t want to play with her anymore. She was weird. Cartoons were in English. Movies too. We heard English at the mall and the doctor’s office. So my sister and I spoke mostly in English. When my parents talked to us, which was always in Spanish, we replied in English. Then, we moved to a town twenty miles west of Boston where my parents bought their first house. My dad built a fence, painted it white. Bit by bit, episode after colorful cartoon episode, grade after grade in my sunny suburban elementary school, where it seemed everyone spoke in English, even the mailman, my world continued to be eclipsed with the sounds and songs and sayings of English.

The summer I was nine years old, my parents took us—by then there were three of us, all girls—to visit Guatemala, their homeland. I can practically sip those sensory details through a straw. Thin cucumber slices sliding in bowls of lime juice and salt. The smoke-filled streets as we squatted in the back of an uncle’s pick-up truck and swished past the city and onto dirt roads bumpy as logs. The sound of iron gates opening and closing, people everywhere, in and out, hola, adiós. Then, a sudden longing on my part: How I wished to move between two languages! But my Spanish was nearly lost by then. So in Guatemala I used English whenever I could and when I was absolutely forced to speak in Spanish—say, to my thousand-year-old tías—I would do so with hunched shoulders, a lowered chin, furrowed brows. Painfully, the words would crumble out and with them, my aunts would giggle like girls. I clumsily chopped verbs, failed to use the subjunctive properly, addressed elders with a casual tú instead of usted. So I began using Spanglish. And I can’t say I ever really stopped.

On that first trip to Guatemala, to the land my father still longs to return to someday, to the home my mother carries in her heart but vows never to inhabit again, I found other ways to communicate. I used gestures or made up words like watchear and la ketchup. Or, I begged my older sister to translate. She had a tighter grip on Spanish, perhaps because she was the first born and had more time to absorb the sounds and rhythms of the language, before I came along. During our visit to Guatemala my parents, it seemed, were around but not available. Either they remained plugged into hushed conversations around the table at night, adults sipping black coffee in which they dipped torn pieces of pan dulce, or they were totally unreachable in the midst of back-slapping laughter with neighbors and relatives they hadn’t seen in over a decade. So I was left to fend for my own words in which to express what it was I wanted.